Authors: Carmen Rodrigues
“You, too, Susie,” Mrs. Cruz says, turning to follow Tamara, who is frantically searching for Jessica, like she might be hiding under a table, holding all the red dresses hostage. “We’ll see you in a few weeks at the memorial service.”
“Right.” A few weeks until my mother’s memorial service—like I could ever forget.
on the ride home from the mall, i do my best to ignore my
father. He’s pretty much number one on my crap list, followed by:
Unfortunately, my father fails to take the hint that my jutted shoulder, brooding lips, and need to blare the radio past human comprehension are actually all part of an effort to drown him out.
“Did something happen with Marisol?” he asks for the fifth time since we hit Kendall Drive. “Why did she leave you behind?”
“Still don’t want to talk about it, Dad.” I stare out the window and watch the world pass by. Miami is so large and crowded. I remember ten years ago when the houses still had yards. Now it seems like every house is just two breaths away from its neighbor. The closeness can make you feel claustrophobic.
“Susie, is this about last night…?” The light turns green, and one second later someone is beeping their horn.
“Nothing ever changes in Miami,” I mumble under my breath.
“What did you say?” My dad leans toward me.
“Nothing,” I mumble again.
“Susie, look, I know that it’s weird for you that Leslie and I are…hanging out. It’s weird for me, too, but—”
“Dad, I don’t want to talk about that either!” I roll down my window all the way. Right now, I can use the fresh air.
“Fine, but we’re going to have to talk about it eventually. The sooner the better. Okay?”
I let the question dissipate. All around me cars are moving. People are traveling toward their next destination, but in this car with my dad, I feel like my next destination is nowhere.
I try to focus on counting the landmarks that we pass. I start with Baptist Hospital on my left and then add Tony Roma’s to my right. Next to Tony Roma’s is an old, run-down porn shop. What kind of people shop there? Probably pervs, I think.
“What day is it?” I ask.
“Um, November twelfth.”
“Next weekend’s homecoming,” I tell him.
“Are you going?”
“Nope. Apparently, I’m not pretty enough to be asked.”
“What? Oh, Susie. Are you upset with your new clothes? I think you look great.”
I shake my head at him. He still doesn’t get it. Even with my stylish new look, I’m still only average. Except now, I’m normal-looking average. I’m fitting-in average.
“Susie,” he says, realizing that he’s not reaching me. “It’s not true. You know that’s not true. Right?”
“Yeah, Dad.” I say with false cheer. “I know.” I stick my head out the window and close my eyes. The wind whips across my face and stings me. The corners of my eyes burn, and my pent-up tears begin to fall.
But that’s okay. Because no one can see me cry.
i don’t go to school monday or tuesday. i tell my father
that I’m sick. I’m not sure if he buys my poor Ferris Bueller impression (I coughed until my throat was sore and littered my room with dry, crumpled-up tissues) or if I’m still riding the waves of his guilt train, but he doesn’t argue with me about my prognosis. When I tell him that I have the flu, he nods his head and hands me the remote to my TV.
For two days, I stay in my bed. I don’t move. I don’t shower. I leave my bedroom only when I have to pee. Other than that, I wrap myself in my covers, turn on my side, and spend hours watching television. Television is a great escape for me. It’s the only time I can actually be awake and mentally asleep.
On Monday, I watch
Maury Povich, Montel,
even old reruns of
Jerry Springer,
and I feel a little better about myself and my situation. By the end of day one, I’ve convinced myself that there is a whole world full of losers that are way worse off than me.
In the afternoon, I watch the soaps. I check out
Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless,
and
All My Children.
To my surprise, I’m pretty current with the story lines. It seems the plots haven’t really progressed that much since the last time I was sick three years ago.
I spend Tuesday reading to the point of exhaustion. When I drift off to sleep, I dream that I’m a guest on
Tyra
. It’s one of those episodes where you admit to having a secret crush on someone you went to high school with, but I’m Tyra’s only guest. I sit onstage surrounded by empty chairs. When I look at the audience, all I see are classmates and teachers. Mr. Murphy sits in the front row and waves at me. He mouths to me,
Sit up straight. Don’t slouch.
Jessica and Tamara sit in the back with Billy Wilson. They shout out “Geek!” whenever the cameras stop rolling. Marisol sits in the front row, talking to her mother on a cell phone.
Danny’s sits behind a translucent screen. I watch his silhouette, but he never comes out to see me. Tyra calls his name over and over again, but he never comes out from behind the screen.
tuesday afternoon when my dad comes home from work,
he finds me staring at the wall. I’ve run out of reading material, and I’m afraid if I fall asleep I might find myself in some parallel
Tyra
universe.
“Hey.” He sets up a tray on my bed, and before I turn to look at him, I already know what he’s brought for me. It’s a ritual my dad started after my mom died: hot wonton soup and a milky-white bag filled with fortune cookies. When I was a little girl, whenever I got sick my mom used to make homemade chicken soup. I guess my dad figured Chinese was the next best thing.
“Hey.” I sit up and clean the crud out of my eyes. My hair feels like a frizzy ball resting precariously on the top of my head. My gown is damp against my skin. I feel the prickle of armpit hair underneath the flap of my arm. It’s official. I stink.
“I brought you soup, and of course”—he dangles the milky bag in front of me—“your fortune.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I place the bag on the tray, next to the pint of soup. I don’t eat right away. Thanks to my nerves, my appetite is practically nil.
“Not hungry?” My dad opens the soup, and stirs it with the plastic spork. The aroma wafts up through the air and clings to my nostrils.
“A little, I guess. But it’s too hot right now.” I point toward the rising steam as confirmation.
“Oh.” He stands up and walks over to my window. He pulls on the cord of the blinds and light floods the room. “That’s a little better. Cheerier. So…” He claps his hands together and smiles. I can tell that he’s trying really hard, and that breaks my heart just a little. “Think you’ll be ready to go back to school tomorrow?” There’s so much hope in his eyes that all my thoughts of prolonging my illness to the end of the week disappear.
“Yeah, Dad, I feel a little better.” The truth is I am fine. Beside my frizzy hair and stinky armpits, I am perfect on the outside. But on the inside, I’m a wreck. But how do you say that to your dad? “No, I’m feeling a lot better.”
“You know, Leslie told me that Marisol seems a little down, too. Did you have a fight?”
“What, do you and Leslie talk on the phone every day now?” I ask him in a flat voice.
“Not every day, but we do talk occasionally. Does that bother you?”
“Does that bother me? I don’t know, Dad. What do you think?” I give him a dead stare. If he doesn’t get that his dating my best friend’s mother BOTHERS me, then I’m not going to BOTHER to explain it to him.
“Okay, um…” He rubs his temples. “You know I wouldn’t do anything to intentionally hurt you.”
“No, I know you wouldn’t do anything
intentionally
to hurt me.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Well, Dad, like you’ve told me before, life isn’t always fair.”
I watch his face sag, like the skin of a cut-open tomato. I suck in the air around me. I’m angry, not sad. I’m angry that he’s dating someone else and that he’s forgotten about my mother, about chicken soup, about driving to Sears after church every Sunday. I’m angry that he’s ready to move on and for what? For some therapist who’s so insecure she has to constantly ask her daughter how she looks?
“Maybe we should talk about this later.” My dad retreats to the door. He looks broken. His shoulders are slumped. The space around his eyes is wrinkled with tension.
“Everything is always later.” I tell him with a smile. “Right, Dad? Right?”
“Susie—” His voice is dangerously thin. “We’ll talk about this later.”
He holds my gaze for a second before he firmly shuts the door behind him. After he’s gone, I debate what I said, and what I could have said to make him stay. I think about screaming after him, anything to make him hear me. But in the end, I do nothing, because I know it’s no use. What’s the point in yelling words that have already been left behind?
the next few days pass in a blur. i walk through the halls. i
eat my lunch. I attend classes. I don’t smile. I don’t talk. I don’t interact with anyone, but maybe nobody notices because for me that’s pretty normal.
Wednesday Danny cancels his tutoring session. He tells me that he has to meet with Tamara and a group of her friends to finish their homecoming plans. I imagine them all sitting around Denny’s debating limousines over Hummers, a suite at the Sofitel or a room at Loews on the beach. I tell myself I don’t care. I tell myself that I don’t want to rip Tamara’s freshly highlighted hair from her head during driver’s ed, and that when I ignored her stupid student council story, I might have actually hurt her feelings.
On the night of homecoming, I hide out at home, under my covers. I keep my cordless phone next to me. I don’t anticipate that the phone will ring. But for whatever reason, in the back of my mind, I hope that Marisol will call me to tell me something—anything. But she doesn’t.
I haven’t spoken to Marisol since the mall. Not a word, not even when I ran into her at our locker. To be honest, I’m hurt but impressed. Marisol’s never been able to give me the silent treatment for more than four days. She would always tell me to talk to her and express my feelings. But this week, she’s been different. Tougher.
To survive our separation, I tell myself that I’m stronger. Anything she can do, I can do better. But that may not be true. I’ve dialed her number three times tonight, but I hung up the phone before it could ring.
And then I gave myself the pep talk. I told myself that she deserves for me to be mad at her. How could she abandon me…for a boy? How could she want our parents to date? She’s in the wrong. What right does she have to be mad at me?
It’s been surprisingly easy to be angry at Marisol, primarily because she’s so happy. When I went back to school on Wednesday, she was wearing lip gloss and her hair was slicked back into a ponytail. She looked like she had just stepped out of a Noxzema commercial—fresh and excited. Worse, she was eating lunch with Ryan. She sat at his table with HIS friends. She smiled and talked to everyone like SHE belonged. With THEM.
So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that she hasn’t called me today. And that she didn’t call me yesterday or the day before. And that she may never call me again.
When the clock turns eight, I crawl out from under the covers and tread into the kitchen. My dad is gone for the night. I didn’t ask him where he was going, and he didn’t bother to tell me. So tonight it’s just me and Mogley.
I open the refrigerator and step into the light. I feel like I could eat the world, but I decide to settle for a Snapple and a yogurt. I take it outside into the fresh air. I love late November. Miami is beautiful in late November. The wind trickles in from the Atlantic and the sweltering heat finally breaks and, for a minute, autumn exists. But just for a minute.
I light a candle and inhale the scent of my backyard. It smells like freshly cut grass, which is one reason why my backyard is different from most backyards in Miami. It doesn’t have a pool or an overhead screen. It’s a simple garden that my mother planted ten years ago. And I love it. I love it so much that I’ve single-handedly kept it up since she died.
I sit on the patio swing and rock back and forth under the moon. I feel calm. And that feels strange.
I sip my Snapple and stare at the sky. My mom and I used to do this a lot. I’d rest my head on her belly. We’d hold hands and talk about “secrets of the earth.” Or at least that’s what she called it. I think she was trying to be mysterious for the benefit of my little ears.
“Why are there so many stars, Mommy?”
“I don’t know, sweetie; I think God just wanted us to know that we’re not alone.”
“But we’re not alone. We’ve got Daddy.”
“Yes, but sometimes you can be surrounded by people and still feel very alone. Understand?”
“No.”
“Well, one day you will.”
I close my eyes, and relive other moments with my mom, like that time I was five and I peed in the middle of Wal-Mart and she nearly died of embarrassment. Or when I got sick in the second grade and had to be taken to the hospital to have tests run. I was really scared. I think about my mom’s graduation from nursing school. I think about the birthday party I had when I was eight. I wonder what she would have said to me when I got my period. Would she have been like my father and tossed a box of maxi pads at me, then scurried away? Or would she have sat me down and talked to me? What would she have told me on those days?
And then I ask myself if a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about her.
When she died, I told myself that I would think about her every day, but I haven’t, not because I don’t love her, but mostly because it’s too hard to think about her and live. When I do think about her, I think about how she must have felt during those last few moments of her life. I wonder if she was scared or if she thought about my father and me. I wonder if she knew she was going to die or if she thought that she would survive. I wonder if people have a real comprehension of their own mortality.
The neighborhood is unusually silent except for the sound of a guitar being played. The melody ripples across the distance and pools at my feet. It takes me a while to figure out where it is coming from, but soon I realize that the sound is coming from the back of Marc’s house.
I prop myself up and glance into his backyard. I can see his patio clearly. The light is on and he is sitting there, alone, playing the guitar. I haven’t heard him play the guitar since we were nine. Our parents used to make us take lessons together. He hated it. I loved it. I had no idea he kept up with it. He actually sounds decent, though a little choppy on certain parts of the bridge.
“Marc, we’re leaving now.” Mrs. Sanchez’s voice drifts through the waist-high mesh fence. I hear her heels and subconsciously straighten my spine and try to stop breathing. It’s not that I don’t like her. It’s just that she’s real intimidating. She’s super-tall, and her stare is always condescending. I don’t know how my mom was ever friends with her, but my mom always did have a way of bonding with people, even the snottiest adults.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay? Because your father and I can stay—”
“Mom, it’s fine.” His voice is harsh, and it reminds me of the way that I spoke to my father earlier this week. The guitar stops. I lean back on the swing. I’m having a hard time not watching.
“Marc, it’s going to take time, but once that time passes you will be better than fine, you’ll be great. Okay?” She crosses the space between them with two long strides. “I love you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Marc,” she sighs, obviously hurt. “Okay. Be good.” She turns—then stops and stares into my yard, at my candle still burning on the table adjacent to me. “Oh. Hi, Susie.”
“Oh…Hi, Mrs. Sanchez.” I slide to the left of the burning candle, try to hide even though there’s no point in hiding now.
“I didn’t see you sitting there. How’s your father?”
“Me either,” Marc says sarcastically. He turns in his chair and gives me a look.
“Marc,” Mrs. Sanchez reprimands him, which only makes me feel worse. “Susie, how’s your father?”
“He’s fine, Mrs. Sanchez.”
“Where’s he at? In the house working on his book?” She glances at her watch, impatient like always.
“No, he’s out.” I try not to waste her time with lengthy answers.
“Well, tell him I said hi. And that we’ll talk about your mom’s memorial service next week. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Bye, now. And you,” she turns back to Marc, “be good.” Then she
clickety-click
s away.
With Mrs. Sanchez gone, I find myself in an awkward position. There is a tiny moment when I actually consider saying something, but in situations where you’re caught spying on your neighbor, there are minimal possibilities for conversation restarters.
I contemplate extinguishing my candle and slinking ever so slowly back into my house. But I’m really tired of letting Marc chase me away. I’m really tired of letting everyone chase me away.
“How long you been there?” Marc asks.
“What?” My voice is prickly.
“How long have you been listening to me?”
“I haven’t been listening to anything that sounded like anything.” It’s a dig. I know.
“I was just trying something new,” he says reflectively.
“Well, it doesn’t go like that,” I tell him pointedly.
“You still play?”
I let the question hang out there because the real question is, why is Marc even bothering to talk to me?
“Well, do you?”
“Yeah,” I say, thinking about how much older he sounds since the last time we had an actual conversation. “I play. You’ve never heard me?” It’s a trick question. Anyone who lives in the neighborhood knows that I play. I play in my garden all the time, mostly on Sunday afternoons when Marisol comes over to do her homework. In my mother’s garden I’m safe. No one—not even Marc Sanchez—can take that away from me.
“Yeah, I guess I’ve heard you. You’ve gotten really good.”
The compliment is hard to take because it comes from Marc. A few nice words can’t erase the last six years.
“My girlfriend broke up with me tonight.”
So typical. Marc’s having a pity party, and by process of elimination and proximity I’m
allowed
to be his only guest.
“Ugh, this sucks, this really, really sucks. I really liked that chick, you know?”
I stay silent. I don’t care that Marc’s silly, slutty girlfriend broke up with him. I don’t care that he’s having a bad night. I’ve got my own problems to think about.
Unfortunately, the longer I stay silent, the longer he keeps talking.
“Man, I don’t know. It was like everything was going great, you know? And I…we were cool together. She’s pretty and funny and popular. We just…it was like great. And then she dumps me tonight. We were supposed to go to this dumb dance together, and she dumps me. She says that I didn’t
really
want to go to the dance with her. And that I make everything hard. And that we like different things. And that her mom says that compatibility is super-important…That’s why her parents divorced, you know, because they were
incompatible.
And that”—his voice rises—“is why she thinks we’re no good together. And
she,
get this fucking shit, doesn’t want to waste any more time with someone who’s not her match.” He picks up a rock and throws it hard at the side of his house.
“Well, did you?” I ask, even though I’m thinking that I shouldn’t have asked anything, because at the very end of his
my life sucks
monologue, his voice actually cracked, and I’m seriously afraid that he might start to cry.
“Huh?”
“Did you not want to go to homecoming?”
His patio light flicks off, which makes me think that I was right about the crying thing. I can’t see him, but I hear him sigh exceptionally loud. Then I hear the grass crunch underfoot.
“Hey.” He stops a few feet from my chair.
“Do you do that a lot?” I ask him, even though I know he doesn’t. But sometimes you have to say something just because.
“What?”
“Jump my fence?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“You mind?” He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one with my candle. He motions with his head for permission to sit across from me. I shrug my shoulders and he sits down.
“This dance thing is stupid. Who goes to dances? It’s so gay.” He takes a drag from his cigarette and holds it out to me.
“No thanks. So you did give her a hard time?” I sit up and study his silhouette in the dark. I find the fact that he’s sitting across from me after all these years…uncomfortable.
“If I gave her a hard time, do you think that I would be wearing this stupid tuxedo thing?”
“That’s a tux?” All I can make out in the dark is a white shirt and a dark pair of pants.
“Well, part of it. I took off the tie and jacket after she left.” He tugs at the collar and scratches his neck. “It felt weird. It’s gross how other people wear these things before you do.”
“Yeah, well, try wearing a thong.”
“What?” The end of his cigarette burns orange. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“A thong? An invention designed for the sheer purpose of putting women back in bondage.”
Marc gives me a blank look.
“Forget it.”
“So what are you doing out here on a Saturday night?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble. I’d rather not get into my abandonment issues right now.
“Usually, I go out with Sheila on Saturday. She likes to go to the movies and then she likes to go to Dairy Queen.” He lets out a rumbling moan. “Man!”
“Wow. You act like this is the end of the world. She’s just a chick. Hey—” I pause to explain because he looks like he’s about to snap my head off. “Your word, not mine.”